Something Different: BA Flight 5390

In the summer of 1990 British Airways Flight 539 took off from Birmingham, UK for Málaga, Spain. You could say that the flight didn’t exactly go according to plan.

At 17,300 feet a cockpit window suffered a ‘failure’, and by ‘failure’ I mean the window departed the aircraft and the unstrapped captain headed towards the window – head first – at high speed. Amazingly he survived with only frostbite and bruising (and shock, natch) caused by having the upper half of his body hanging outside the cockpit for 20 minutes in speeds of up to 500 mph while a number of flight attendants held his legs.

He returned to work 6 months later and is still flying today.

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